“All right, let’s have it,” Docker said.
Larkin sipped whiskey, and said quietly, “There’s millions of guys who paid no more attention to this fucking war than if it was a Rotary parade going by in the next county. I’m twenty-nine. I got drafted when I was twenty-six. I spent seven years before that at Railway Express, and nineteen months before that looking for a job. I’ve got an apartment at Thirty-second Street and Third Avenue that costs sixty-five a month, living room, a bedroom, a kitchen. And I got Agnes and a three-year-old daughter. Those years at Railway Express are just seven times Christmas and seven times Thanksgiving for me. I worked those holidays, every fucking one of them at the Grand or the Penn watching college boys come home and whooping it up waiting for their parents or whoever the shit was meeting them. And you know something, Bull? I wrote my boss at Railway Express six months ago to see about my job and he took about four months to answer me, and I got his letter the same day that prick, Hamlin, wrote to you about decompression chambers for GIs. My boss told me some neighborhood news and he told me who Connie Mack had picked for his all-time all-star baseball team, and then he got to the point of saying they’d hired some older guys and some deferred guys and they were cutting the mustard real good, and while he wanted to be fair to everybody he couldn’t promise me I could go back to work.”
“You’ve got me hooked, Larkin,” Docker said.
“What the fuck you mean?”
“Who the hell did Connie Mack pick?”
“Shit. Let’s see. George Sisler at first, Eddie Collins at second, Honus Wagner at shortstop, Tris Speaker in center field, the Babe in right—”
“Okay, okay, get to the point.”
“Up at the castle, there’s thousands of dollars worth of food and liquor. Bull, which is where I got this Cutty Sark.” The words were coming faster and the leaping fire highlighted the strain in Larkin’s eyes. “Bonnard knows where we can unload it. Bull. All he wants is for me to use a truck for a few hours. All I need is that truck. That stuffs got to be worth eight or nine thousand dollars.”
“Forget it,” Docker said. “You’re not going into the black market, Matt, and neither is anybody else in this section.”
“What the hell good is that food and booze doing anybody in that castle?”
“That’s not the point, so forget it.”
“You want to turn it over to the brass? So it will wind up in some officers’ mess in Paris or London?” Larkin took another sip of whiskey. “Bull, I don’t think you heard a goddamn word I said. It’s a three-way split between me and Bonnard and this character, Gervais. I’ll cut you in for half of mine, and if I can clear around two thousand it means I got ten or twelve months’ breathing space to find a job when I get out.” His voice rose angrily. “Don’t you understand, for Christ’s sake? I’m talking about the rest of my whole fucking life.”
“Goddamn it, no,” Docker said.
Larkin lit a cigarette and flipped the match into the fire. He admired Docker, but distrusted him because he always expected too much of people. Which was another way of saying he wanted them to disappoint him. If you insisted everybody had to be perfect, like the priests did, naturally you’d have a world full of sinners to forgive. Larkin shrugged and was pouring himself another drink when the tarpaulin was pulled back by Solvis, who stuck his head and shoulders into the cave.
“You better come quick, sarge. Shorty Kohler just pissed all over the new kid’s chow.”
Docker could hear Kohler’s angry voice, clear on the frozen air, as he and Larkin ran toward the men who formed a tableau against the snow and fog streaming through the valley.
“Fucking-A, I’ll tell you why I did it. I did it because you’re a mother-fucking deserter. Is that straight enough for you, Baird?”
Gelnick, Farrel and Dormund stood by the wheelbarrow they had used to bring up the hot food from the Bonnards’. They were all staring solemnly at Baird’s mess kit, which was tipped on the ground, the turkey stew and vegetables soaking in a yellow urine that had soaked the snow around them.
“You shouldn’t have done that.” Baird’s lips were trembling; he looked close to tears.
“Okay, I shouldn’t have done it,” Shorty Kohler said. “So what the fuck you gonna do about it?”
“Shorty, knock it off,” Docker said in a tone he seldom needed to use. He took Baird’s arm and pulled the boy around to face him. “Now listen to me, goddamn it. You don’t have to take this kind of crap from anybody. You understand? From anybody.”
“I don’t want to fight him—”
From the revetment Trankic shouted, “Bull, for Christ’s sake, get over here!” Docker turned and saw the big corporal waving urgently to him from the loading platform of the cannon.
“I’ll settle this later, Kohler,” he said, and ran across the crest of the hill to Trankic. “What the hell is it?”
“I ain’t sure. Bull. Some kind of crazy light behind those mountains, something like we saw at Werpen.”
Docker unslung his binoculars and walked to the edge of the cliff, listening to the winds sweeping around him as he scanned the valley.
Tex Farrel stared down at the congealed lumps of food in Baird’s mess kit. “You know something?” he said conversationally. “We shouldn’t wait for Docker to settle every little thing that goes on around here. Seems to me the sarge’s got enough on his mind...”
“What the fuck you mean?” Kohler said.
“What I guess I really mean. Shorty, is that you are full of shit,” Farrel said, spacing the last few words slowly and deliberately.
Kohler looked around at the other men and then back at Farrel, his smile puzzled, tentative. “What the fuck is this, Tex?”
“I just told you. You’re so dumb you can’t figure it out? Baird’s part of this section now. Besides, you’re a professional, at least that’s what you tell people, and he’s just a kid.”
“Hey, wait a minute. I got no beef with you.”
Tex Farrel took off his helmet and put it on the ground. He removed his field jacket and handed it to Solvis. “Shorty, where I come from no white man would be low enough to piss on a hungry man’s food.”
“You better watch that loud mouth of yours, Tex.”
“Just put your hands up, short pants, and start worrying about your own mouth.”
“All right, you Texas meathead.” Kohler moved in fast and slugged Farrel with a left hook to the body that sounded as if he had swung his fist against a taut drum.
Farrel grunted and backed away, but when his boots were planted firmly he said, “Shit, I thought you did this for a living,” and snapped a hard left into Kohler’s face.
Shorty pulled his jaw down under his shoulder and crowded Farrel, stinging him with a flurry of blows, rocking him with hooks to the body and trying to measure him for straight rights. But the frozen ground hampered him, he couldn’t hook off his jabs, and most of his punches lacked precision and power.
Watching, Gelnick thought that they were just as rotten to one another as they were to everybody else, pissing on good food like that. He filled his own mess kit with food from the wheelbarrow and took it to Baird, but the dumb nebbish didn’t want it, staring at Tex Farrel fighting, not believing anybody could stick up for him, which Gelnick could understand, like he understood all those goyim wanted to be Christ on a cross, naked in the wind with everybody feeling sorry for them. So screw them all, he thought, and hunkered down with his mess kit to watch the fight.